Zenoss grows customer base and sets up shop in Austin

Mark Hinkle, VP of Business & Community Development at Zenoss reached out to bring me up to speed on Zenoss.

Zenoss provides software for network, server and application management. Zenoss Core is a community offering licensed under the GPLv2. Customers can purchase support around Zenoss Core, or purchase Zenoss Enterprise Edition, available under a commercial license. Zenoss also has specialized offerings for xSPs that need to manage hundreds/thousands of clients.

Zenoss announced the following news today:

• Added 32 new paying enterprise customers in 1Q08
• Counts over 100 paying enterprise customers including SugarCRM, Rackspace, Disney, Georgia Tech & Instinet
• Over 3,500 active deployments (i.e. potential future paying customers)
• Establishing a development center in Austin, Texas…virtually the Mecca of IT management software development

I asked Mark to speak a little about their competition. Mark stated that Hyperic and Zenoss are complimentary. Hyperic is able to dive deep into the application and server stack, while Zenoss delivers a heterogeneous, broader, view of the IT environment. And while GroundWork and Zenoss offer competing capabilities, there is enough interest in open source IT management products that they are both growing.

Then Mark talked a little about OSS & closed-source IT management vendors meeting up at Barcamp. Mark said (near quote):

“…everyone realized that it’s not practical to say we are going to ‘replace HP or BMC’. So, we started thinking about how OSS products could compliment closed-source products that are widely used today.”

I really like the approach of complimenting current products. It demonstrates that the OSS vendors in question are spending time and resources adding value versus “fighting the good fight against closed-source software”. Customers aren’t about to rip-and-replace anytime soon. The future of IT will be found in a mixture of both the closed-source and OSS product and business models.

The more I hear about OSS vendors with a GPL’d community product and a commercially licensed enterprise product, the more I’m convinced of this inevitability…almost as others are convinced that SaaS and/or a support business model is the inevitable end game for the software market. Time will tell…

 

Get your software counted in the Open Source Census

Just read about the launch of “The Open Source Census“. This is the next step in OpenLogic’s efforts to get a better sense of which OSS products are actually used in enterprises. Until now, the OSS product usage data we’ve seen has been from surveys of people who likely don’t know the extent of OSS usage across their company.

So, time for you all to participate:

1. Start here
2. Take inventory of OSS packages installed
3. Upload the results (anonymously) to The Open Source Census
4. Review the consolidated results from others

The results so far: 231 machines have been scanned and a total of 52,354 installations of 650 unique OSS packages have been found.

It’ll be interesting to see the results in a few weeks.

Kudos to sponsors OpenLogic, IDC, Collabnet, Holme Roberts & Owen, Navica, Olliance Group, Unisys, Open Solutions Alliance and Open Source Business Foundation for making this happen!

 

WaveMaker is a very cool visual AJAX tool

Chris Keene of WakeMaker reached out to me in response to my Freetard post. Since then, I’ve been reading his blog and have learned a thing or two about his thoughts on Web 2.0 and why WaveMaker is addressing the market in the way they are.

Chris writes:

“Applications are like meteorites - they never migrate, they just land and stick.

…

The real power of Web 2.0 lies not in modernizing legacy client/server applications, but in modernizing the skill sets of client/server developers. If an app was built in VB or MS Access and it works, leave it there. The real question is what to do with the developer who built that app?”

WaveMaker is focused on this question. Obviously a large percentage of Microsoft customers are happy being so. However, some customers are considering whether Web 2.0 style architectures can be a route towards open standards or potentially a lower risk of vendor lock-in through open source. Hundreds of AJAX toolkits are available today, but this itself is a huge problem. Next, there is still a skills requirement to get the toolkit working and construct a visual development environment like the developer has/had with VB and Visual Studio. That’s where WaveMaker comes in. According to the WaveMaker website:

“WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio is an easy-to-use visual builder that enables the drag & drop assembly of scalable, web-applications using Ajax widgets, web services and databases.”

Interestingly enough, WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio was built using the WaveMaker foundation (which itself is built on OSS products Hibernate, Spring and Dojo Toolkit). With over 1,000 downloads a day, WaveMaker is beginning to gain traction. Download WaveMaker and follow the tutorial and let us know what you think. WaveMaker is licensed under the AGPL and also available under a commercial license.

 

Dude, where’s my $60B?

Dave’s writes about a new report from Standish Group that claims: FOSS is costing traditional vendors $60B in annual revenues.

Having spent 4+ years doing market forecasts, I can think of two key methodologies that Standish used to come up with the $60B figure.

Option A:

• [1a] Only count revenue that OSS vendors (and products) are generating from the sale of product licenses and/or subscription contracts…i.e. $X
• [2a] Use an uplift factor, y, to account for total revenue lost (license, services and maybe hardware) .i.e. $Xy
• [3a] Add up all the $Xy figures and the result is $60B

If Standish used this approach, I’d seriously question the $60B. Remember that IDC (the premier market forecasting firm in the business) has sized revenue from OSS at $1.8B in 2006, growing 26% to $5.7B in 2011. So, we’d be at $2.3B in OSS revenue by YE2007. Take that and multiply by 5x for the services and hardware revenue lost by traditional software vendors, and you get $11.5B. Not chump change, but not $60B either…which is why I don’t think Standish used this approach.

Option B:

• [1b] If the customer is using an OSS product in production, figure out what a comparable closed-source license cost would have been…i.e. $X
• [2b] same as [2a]
• [3b] same as [3a]

The problem with step [1b] above is it assumes that the customer would have, for example, paid for a license of DB2 or Oracle if MySQL or PostgreSQL weren’t available. I believe this to be a bad assumption. The majority of OSS use is in situations where the customer would not have purchased anything because the project did not have sufficient funding. As such, I’d question if there is a “real loss” as Standish claims. It’s an opportunity for OSS vendors to CREATE net new revenue opportunity. In most cases, this is still an opportunity as the overwhelming majority of OSS used in production does not result in $$$ into an OSS vendor’s coffers. In a situation that the customer did in fact pay for the OSS product, and saved $A dollars by using the OSS product, that $A does not disappear. Whatever is saved through the use of OSS is spent elsewhere in the IT organization…. (And traditional vendors see their fair share of this spending).

While I question the $60B figure, I don’t think it’s a negative for the software market. From my experience, OSS has developed new customers far more than it has stolen customers from the traditional software vendors. And when customers save using OSS, they reinvest those savings into other IT projects.

 

Compiere releases V3.0 of its open source ERP package

Compiere just released version 3.0 of its namesake product with “well over 150 improvements“. If you’re not familiar with Compiere (hey, how many of us purchase ERP products), think of Compiere as an open source alternative to SAP or Oracle’s applications. Judging by a quick look at their product line and Compiere’s customer success stories, Compiere is squarely targeted at the SMB customer segment. As such, this would put Compiere up against Microsoft, more than it would against SAP or Oracle.

Compiere offers 3 editions, a free “Community Edition”, a “Standard Edition” priced at $25/user/month and a “Professional Edition” priced at $50/user/month. Maybe it’s the pricing class that I just took this weekend, but I really like how Compiere has been able to differentiate the 3 offering based on features that will lead the buyer to pick “A” vs. “B”. I also like how the “Standard Edition” and “Professional Edition” are following the gated access to OSS products business model that has worked so well for Red Hat and others.

Give Compiere V3.0 a try and let us know what you think. (Personally, I’m not a fan of registering to try out an OSS product. We tried that with WAS CE and some of the contact info we received was quite amusing, not remotely close to PG-rated, but amusing…folks at Compiere: maybe make the info optional, and hence reduce a barrier to trials?)

 

Why I’m okay that Google Code doesn’t support AGPL

Following threads from the Clipperz blog, I read this exchange of messages between Chris DiBona & Greg Stein of Google and a group of folks that want Google to host AGPL’d projects on Google Code. (I’d urge you to read the thread as it’s difficult to argue that Chris & Greg are being unreasonable).

As you know, the terms of the GPL only “kick in” when GPL’d code is distributed. Users/companies are not obliged to reveal their changes to GPL’d code unless the code is redistributed outside of their organization. The AGPL fixes this loophole.

Matt and some of the folks replying to Chris & Greg seem to think that Google is wearing its Evil Hat by restricting AGPL’d projects on Google Code. They believe that the growing use of AGPL’d by projects will prevent Google, (Yahoo, EBay, Amazon, or countless other companies that modify & use OSS without redistributing it) from using OSS without contributing their changes back.

I disagree ;-)

Let’s start with the various OSS projects that Google et al. pay their employees to work on, and the support, financially or otherwise, that these companies offer to OSS projects. We like to romanticize that OSS projects become solid products through the magical combination of thousands of non-affiliated contributors working for the greater good. The truth is that the majority of contributions, to the majority of leading OSS projects come from someone paid to do so by a vendor. Does anyone really think that Linux would be where it is now if not for IBM, HP, Oracle, Red Hat & Novell employees? Would PHP be where it is without Yahoo’s help? Would Firefox be where it is without the significant search-driven dollars that Google pays to Mozilla?

Second, which company in their right mind would open up its differentiated IT assets to competitors? If Linux, Apache HTTPD, PHP and MySQL had originally been licensed under the AGPL, I can almost guarantee that Google et al. would have paid for the right to make their own changes without having to contribute them back (as you can today with many dual-licensed OSS projects). Worst case, Google et al. may never have grown to their current state. Imagine if Google had to decide between closed-source software that they couldn’t modify, or open source software that they could modify, but those modifications would be seen by the competition. In both cases the lack of differentiation enabled by IT would have been enough to reconsider the business plan.

I’ve never been a fan of cutting off my nose to spite my face. Sadly, in the pursuit of “OSS purity”, the OSS community comes awful close to doing this all too often. I’m perfectly okay with Google et al. benefiting from OSS. If these vendors don’t contribute an equal value back to the OSS community through their own OSS efforts, I’m certain that they have added enough value to the lives of every IT user (OSS proponent or otherwise) to far offset any deficit from the use of OSS without “giving back enough”

 

BitNami makes it easy for mom & semi-geeks to use OSS

I recently caught up with BitRock’s CEO, Erica Brescia, & founder Daniel Lopez to hear more about BitRock & BitNami. BitRock’s goal is to help drive the widespread use of OSS products by reducing barriers for both customers and OSS ISVs.

The company is best known for its BitRock InstallBuilder cross-platform product that competes with the likes of InstallShield. While the product itself is not OSS, BitRock offers open source projects free licenses to the product.

As OSS ISVs began to use BitRock’s InstallBuilder, they started hearing that customers didn’t just want the standalone ISV product. Customers wanted the whole stack that the ISV product runs on. In response, BitRock now offers ISVs Custom Stacks (for a fee). BitRock counts OSS leaders such as MySQL, SugarCRM, JasperSoft and Funambol as customers. In fact, over 20% of SugarCRM downloads are attributed to a Custom Stack that BitRock provides to SugarCRM (including SugarCRM & the relevant stack underneath). BitRock is also expanding into a SaaS-based “Network Service”, similar to the Red Hat Network. This offering is targeted at OSS vendors who want to push updates, check configurations, etc. at their end customer sites.

While everything BitRock does is closed-source in nature, (and pays the bills), the company has introduced BitNami to further the use of OSS as a community outreach service. BitRock hopes that BitNami will become a leading destination for end users and the average developer that wants an OSS product or an OSS development environment respectively, but doesn’t want to hassle with dependencies etc. Since December 2007, BitNami has served up over 100,000 downloads of popular OSS Stacks. BitRock plans to open up the site so anyone can build and host their own OSS stack.

Nearly half of the visitors at BitNami are coming from non-techie sites and are downloading stacks for popular OSS applications such as WordPress or Joomla. The other half are developers that don’t want to collect and install their OSS development environment one piece at a time. Of note, the WAMP distribution is getting more than its fair share of traction as OSS usage continues to grow on Windows.

It will be interesting to track how BitNami evolves. Simplifying the finding, installation and on-going updates to OSS products will surely help the adoption of OSS. The expanding reach of OSS to folks that program out of necessity should help create more ‘developers’ out of relatively “non-technical” people; and they’ll have an affinity to OSS.

 

RIA vendor Curl shifts to Eclipse

Rich Internet Application (RIA) vendor Curl, named InfoWorld’s 2008 Technology of the Year in the RIA category, announced that they will be rebasing the Curl IDE on Eclipse. The Eclipse-based product, named Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CDE) is expected to Beta in mid-2008. Why the rebasing? According to Curl:

“Today’s programmers expect to do much of their programming in an integrated development environment (IDE) without having to jump around to unrelated and disconnected tools.”

Valid point indeed. I wonder why Curl didn’t start with an Eclipse-based IDE from the beginning. In researching this post, I found this InfoWorld article on Curl:

“One of a number of “middleweight” solutions in the RIA (rich Internet application) spectrum, Curl is a language, an IDE, and a runtime engine that goes beyond the capabilities of lighter-weight AJAX without incurring the heavier overhead of the Java or .Net runtime. A number of Curl characteristics make it especially suitable for enterprise use: excellent performance, the ability to handle intermittent connectivity, support for large data sets, and graceful presentation of complex interfaces.

….

As I said last August, “Curl may well be the most interesting computer language that you don’t already know. Given that you can use the personal tools free forever and deploy the results on the Internet for free, the only barrier to evaluating it would be finding the time”"

Ahh, time….hey, if Curl can find the time to rebase on Eclipse, surely some of you can find the time to give the Curl language and runtime a whirl?

 

Can OSS infrastructure vendors thrive in a cloud computing future?

Many of you likely read highlights from Gartner’s “The State of Open Source, 2008″ report a few weeks back. You can read the report here.

Considering all the hype around cloud computing, I re-read Gartner’s comments on OSS and cloud computing:

“By 2011, open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.

….

Contrast this with cloud-based providers whose cost of services offered (the equivalent of the package provider’s cost of goods sold) is dominated by the cost of such infrastructure. This basic economic shift has driven the majority of cloud-based providers to strongly embrace commodity hardware and open-source software to drive down the cost of services offered to unprecedented levels. In particular, unlike the majority of enterprise data centers, the largest cloud-based data centers are self-supporting the Linux kernel instead of paying a license fee for a managed Linux distribution (such as Red Hat) to completely eliminate software license fees. Only by radically reducing their infrastructure costs can cloud-based providers offer the pricing models (based on radically lower profit margins) necessary to disrupt the incumbent packaged software. Thus, the simple economics of “cost of goods sold” will drive “zero software license fee” open source to be the dominant (more than two-thirds) software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.”

The punch line is: OSS will virtually own the software infrastructure layer in cloud computing environments, but, the OSS products will be used without paid support. Infrastructure OSS vendors may want to consider this when deciding what features to include in the for-fee offering vs. in the “Community Edition” offering.

Major software & hardware vendors will all offer some form of a cloud computing environment in the future. However, the revenue opportunities for OSS infrastructure vendors does not appear promising:

• Amazon - OSS supported internally?
• Dell - Open source and Microsoft software infrastructure?
• Google - OSS supported internally?
• HP - Open source and Microsoft software infrastructure?
• IBM - IBM’s software infrastructure & maybe some OSS (supported internally)?
• Microsoft - Microsoft’s software infrastructure
• Oracle - Oracle’s software infrastructure & maybe some OSS (supported internally)?
• Red Hat - Red Hat and other third-party open source software infrastructure?
• SAP - ???
• Sun - Oracle’s software infrastructure & maybe some OSS (supported internally)?

Cloud computing appears poised to restrict the size of the OSS market much more than any closed-source software vendor could achieve. Luckily, we’re at least a decade away from customers defaulting to a cloud computing environment over traditional on-premise environments. That is plenty of time for OSS infrastructure vendors to react…

 

Is support for OSS optional in your business?

Jon Williams, CTO at Kaplan Test Prep co-founder of the New York CTO club, and InfoWorld blogger, wrote something very interesting:

“….Matt Asay, OSBC organizer and also an open source vendor. He asked me the following:- “If an open source platform is stable and my team experienced with it, would I continue to pay annual support fees?”. Unfortunately for the vendors, the answer was “no”. It truly is a contradiction because if customers don’t pay a vendor, they’ll go out of business and their products will not be further developed. Frankly, I don’t have a better answer. But that said, IMO, open source is a model that is here to stay. Vendors are diving into it and making money, although nowhere near Microsoft’s current profit margins.”

I spoke to several customers at EclipseCON about their use of open source, and specifically the support around the OSS products in use. The contradiction that Jon points out is something that I heard in spades. Namely, “I will buy support for the first year while my developers get comfortable with the product. But after a year, at most two, we’ll know enough to be able to support ourselves.” One person implementing an OSS content management product said: “We don’t need on-going support, we need installation support and someone to call in the first 2 months while we implement the product, but after that, I don’t see a need for support beyond what we’ll get from Google searches”.

I had discounted these comments, especially about only requiring help during the installation process as they mostly came from very small companies (<100 employees?). Maybe I need to re-think this. If these views are/become widespread, they reinforce my view that a support only business isn’t the path forward for OSS. Red Hat was way ahead of us all in recognizing this and offering gated access to their products.